Nine Inch Nails Release New Album "The Slip" for Free

A mere two months after surprising fans with the web-released Ghosts I-IV and two weeks after surprising radio stations with new single "Discipline," Trent Reznor and his prolific Nine Inch Nails announced this morning that their hinted-at new album The Slip was available as a free and immediate download. According to Reznor, the album is being given away for free as a "thank you to our fans for your continued support." The album features ten tracks and is once again licensed by Creative Commons, allowing fans to remix it, repost it and do what they wish with it. Reznor also promises CD and vinyl copies in July.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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